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Grad Profile: @SuperMarmite dishes up a social marketplace for homemade meals

Grad Profiles highlight the personal and professional stories of Founder Institute Graduates from across the globe.

This profile on Super Marmite, a graduate of the Paris Founder Institute, was written by Emma Tzeng. Founded in 2010 by Olivier Desmoulin, Super Marmite lets home cooks connect with hungry meal searchers in Paris.

Julia Child, French food enthusiast and graduate of Paris’s own Le Cordon Bleu, famously wrote, “In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.” Residents and tourists alike know this very well, as Paris enjoys a worldwide reputation as being a haven for food and pastry aficionados.

As diverse and historically rich as the culinary scene in France is, sometimes simply choosing where to dine can be downright overwhelming. French startup Super Marmite understands that finding a reasonably-priced, well-prepared meal in the nation’s food capital, Paris, can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack at times. That’s why founder Olivier Desmoulin has set out to make dining in Paris more personable, communal, and affordable with Super Marmite, which allows home chefs to post dishes they are preparing for the evening online, set prices, and invite meal-seekers to buy and pick up or join them in their homes to enjoy their culinary creations.

“The idea was to create a neighborhood menu with dishes cooked by locals,” Desmoulin explains in The New York Times. “I thought to myself, ‘All around me there are people cooking simple meals. Surely amongst all of them there [is] the dish I was dreaming of, something cooked with love.’”

With Super Marmite, home cooks simply log on to the website and post the dish or dishes they are preparing for the evening. Such homemade creations generally sell for about 3 to 8 euros each, or $5 to $11. Chefs can then specify a location for food pick-up or invite guests into their home to partake in a meal together. Super Marmite is great for aspiring chefs hoping to gain local exposure, meal preparers who want to share their leftovers for a profit, and adventurous foodies searching for an authentic meal off the beaten path.

Desmoulin first conceived of the idea one evening when he ran out of groceries at home.

“It was late; I was hungry; and sure, there’s a lot of fast food in the neighborhood--kebabs and the like--but it’s not exactly what I wanted,” Desmoulin recalls. “It’s a lonely feeling, you know, and I thought there must be plenty of people around here who cook, preparing little meals.”

Super Marmite has essentially tapped into Paris’s network of foodies and home cooks and provided an accessible platform for them to connect over meals. With a mission as delicious and agreeable as that, it’s difficult to say who wouldn’t be on board with Super Marmite.